After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  Williams also faced the First Wallabies in 1908, in a 9–6 Wales win at Cardiff on the day that Paddy Moran, Tom Richards and Danny Carroll all made their international debuts. The reffing hat-trick for Gil Evans came at a stunning victory by 24–8 over the Wallabies at the Arms Park, with Johnnie bagging a brace. No wonder Tom Richards remembered him so well in Flanders; and no wonder Cardiff RFC had the historic whistle engraved for Evans. A wintry Wales, Cardiff Arms Park in particular, did not suit the Wallabies: they lost three and drew one in a punishing sequence of seven games between 12 and 28 December – the entire tour only saw two other losses, to Mobbs’s Midlands and Llanelli. They must have been glad to see in the New Year in England and a return to winning ways at Blackheath. Wales and Williams meanwhile went on to a second successive Triple Crown and Grand Slam.

  Johnnie’s final season in red brought yet another Triple Crown. His last try was against France in Paris and he was given the captaincy (his coal-exporting business meant he was fluent in French and could decipher their calls) and the match ball from the 13–0 victory. His farewell in 1911 – the decider against Ireland – was played in front of a record 50,000 crammed into a besieged Arms Park: as fans scaled the walls and rushed the gates, mounted police were called in. There was no try-scoring flourish for Johnnie, but the 16–0 result crowned Wales’ Golden Era with a third Slam, this time officially recognised with the admission of France. The next would take another thirty-nine years. Johnnie played rugby once more at Cardiff in November 1913, with Wales’ Dai Westacott and Dick Thomas, in aid of the Senghenydd Disaster Fund; it was there also that he would enlist in the 20th Royal Fusiliers, seven weeks after war was declared. He soon transferred to the 21st Battalion, where his platoon boasted a full international back line with Welshmen ‘Hop’ Maddock, Willie Watts and English winger, Alan Roberts.

  In March 1914, the WFU declined an invitation from the German Rugby Union to play in Hamburg; in August, the choice to face Germany or not was taken out of their hands. The familiar letter had been circulated to clubs by the WFU, its own version full of Welsh pride and somewhat long of wind:

  We are sure some of the more patriotic spirits amongst our leading players have already joined the Army, but we are equally well sure of the fact that a far larger proportion has not yet done so. Considering that our players comprise probably the very pick of men eligible for service in the Army, and considering that Welshmen have a reputation for not being deficient either in patriotism or pluck, we feel sure we shall not appeal in vain. If only every man on every First XV in Wales were to enlist, what a magnificent body there would be at the service of our country, and even then there would still be plenty of players left to enable the game to be played as usual.

  In South Wales, war provoked the same contrasting response from rugby and football as elsewhere in Britain; only here rugby was in a majority not only moral but sporting. Eleven survivors from mourning Senghenydd RFC volunteered as soon as war broke out. When Cardiff City went ahead with its football fixtures, a letter to the Western Mail protested: ‘how much nobler if the 22 players, fine specimens of manhood, had rifles on their shoulders, marching to the battlefield instead of playing with a leather-encased bladder’. In January 1915, the 16th (Service) Battalion (Cardiff City), The Welsh Regiment, was finally raised after eight weeks’ hard pushing by the city’s mayor, but its name had nothing to do with the football club. Recruiting outside Ninian Park had been as unsuccessful as it was at Chelsea and Arsenal.

  The Cardiff City Battalion was now Johnnie’s military home with his new subaltern’s commission; war inverted rugby’s pecking order as he discovered his club vice-captain, the older Major Fred Smith, was now his company commander. Cardiff RFC donated a full rugby strip and boots to the 16th, which numbered internationalists Clem Lewis, Bert Winfield and Dick Thomas, as well as a host of club players. Lewis, Johnnie’s Cardiff team-mate in 1909–10, was:

  one of the best outside-half backs of his time, a very neat and elusive player, nice looking and popular. He served the club well in the seasons 1909–10 to 1923–24 [as captain], won eleven Welsh caps, was a Cambridge Blue [twice] and a Barbarian [once, in wartime, against the South Africans] and held, probably the unique distinction of having played for his club, his varsity and his country prior to and after the War.1

  We will meet him again. Clem, Bert and Johnnie soon played rugby for the Welsh Regiment against 11th South Wales Borderers (SWB), but 1915 was spent in Colwyn Bay and Wiltshire in a different sort of training. Their unit’s last public parade before going overseas in December was held in Cardiff, where else but at the Arms Park; seven months later, half of its thousand men would be killed, wounded or missing.

  If Lewis and Williams were the backs of legendary Welsh flair, then E.J.R. ‘Dick’ Thomas was the grunt up front. Sewell put him amongst the ‘hefty and tough men in the [Welsh] pack. Burly and hard bitten sons of the hills, caring little or nothing for physical hurt whether to self or opponent, and one of the toughest and fairest was Dick Thomas.’ The miner began his rugby career with Rhondda junior clubs Ferndale and Penygraig and, briefly, Cardiff; when he joined the Glamorgan Police, duty postings made the calls on his team loyalties, to Mountain Ash, Glamorgan Police and County. Strong showings for the last against the overseas tourists commended him for his first cap against the 1906 South Africans; it was appendicitis, not poor performance, that delayed his next cap until 1908 and the first Welsh encounter with France. He starred in the Grand Slam win against Ireland, but a regrettable incident against the Wallabies for Glamorgan – Grierson’s ‘clean play’ jibe comes to mind – may have cost him another cap for Wales against Australia.

  Dick’s international career ended against Scotland in 1909, but he had years of club rugby left. He won only four caps but his presence in Welsh rugby seemed greater. On his next police posting in 1911 he joined Bridgend, where he became captain. On the outbreak of war, he already had years of service to his community behind him before he joined the City Battalion to serve his country with friend, colleague and team-mate Fred Smith, and Johnnie Williams. He was natural NCO material and was rapidly promoted to company sergeant major before crossing to France.

  Rugby continued behind the lines between British units, with guest appearances by any former Wallaby captain who happened to pass: for six months the battalion was in a quiet, if rain-soaked, sector – routine conditions for Welsh rugby. The South Wales Argus launched an appeal to send footballs ‘both rugby and association’ to the troops at the front. Captain Herbert Butler of the 2nd Battalion, Monmouthshire Regiment, wrote: ‘I beg to acknowledge receipt of the Rugby Football you so kindly sent us. I can assure you it will be a great source of amusement to the men of this battalion.’ In May 1915 Private George Noyes of the Welsh Regiment wrote from prison camp in Altdamm, with news of Welsh victories over the Yorkshire Light Infantry and the Rest of Camp: ‘There are sixteen Cardiff men here and we would very much like a rugby ball sent out, or anything else to banish the monotony. PS it may interest Cardiffians to know that Wales still leads in sport.’ Williams had his treasured ball from the 1911 Paris match sent out for an inter-platoon competition in February 1916. In June they moved south to the Somme, in preparation for their first action in the Big Push. For many it was their last.

  Their 38th (Welsh) Division was spared the first-day slaughter but moved into the front line facing Mametz Wood on 5 July, when the awful mismatch of ‘bare chests against machine-guns’ (Churchill’s phrase) was already plain to see on the interminable casualty lists. The City Battalion was joined by 11th SWB, their rugby sparring partners of 1915. Like Noel Hodgson’s doomed Devonshires before action at Mansell Copse a week earlier, their planned morning attack looked suicidal: down a slope, across ‘Death Valley’, then up into the wood, with their flank enfiladed from the right by machine guns dug in at nearby copses, all in broad daylight. A request to attack before dawn was denied; at 0830 the first wave set off.

  In a familiar Somme
story, the artillery bombardment had failed to take out the enemy wire and emplacements. The verbatim battalion War Diary account, scrawled in pencil under unimaginable pressure, makes for stark, unpunctuated reading:

  8.30am Bn. under orders drawn up on their own side of slope facing MAMETZ WOOD in lines of platoons with a 2 platoon frontage. II/SWB in support IO/SWB in reserve. Our artillery ceased firing at wood at 8.30am + first lines of Bn. proceeded over the crest of the slope but came instantly under heavy machine gun frontal fire from MAMETZ WOOD, enfilade fire from FLATIRON COPSE + SABOT COPSE + the German Second System, which now between MAMETZ WOOD + BAZENTIN LE PETIT WOOD, Bn. suffered heavily + has to withdraw to their own side of crest. Bn. made two more attacks but position was much too exposed for any hope or success + orders were received to cease operation. 11/SWB attempted to approach the wood through a gulley running between CATERPILLAR WOOD, slope mentioned above but machine gun fire drove them back. Our losses:- 6 offs. killed, 6 wounded, 268 OR’s killed, missing or wounded. Weather very wet, this adding greatly to exhaustion of troops Bn. received orders to return to their Bivouac. Moved off 10.30pm Arrived 4.am 8/7/16.2

  One of those ‘Offs’, Captain Johnnie Williams, led his company into the maelstrom of machine-gun bullets. Shrapnel shattered his left leg and his famous ‘side step and inward swerve’ would be seen no more. Infection followed amputation, and by the time his last letter of good spirits reached his wife, he was dead; he was one of 140 killed in 300 battalion casualties that day.

  One OR (Other Rank) died instantly. Survivor William Davies of the 11th SWB told the BBC seventy-one years later how he hid all day from the bullets behind the body of the ‘old rugby international, Dick Thomas from Mountain Ash … a big, huge man … killed just like that, just in front of me’. Sewell had said of Thomas that he ‘could always take a knock without moving a hair; this served him well in the police force as on the football field’. On the battlefield, his hulking body soaked up leaden punishment for twelve hours and saved another man’s life. In 1987, William Davies was humbly grateful to Dick for ‘laying his body on the line’.

  That huge body was lost. WFU official, T.D. Schofield of Bridgend, paying tribute in 1917 to Thomas as one in the ‘large army of heroic Welsh Rugby players who have laid down their lives on the altar of sacrifice in this worldwide war for righteousness, liberty and justice’, recalled one Monmouth player ‘who would sooner face any man than Dick Thomas the fiery chariot’. Another Thomas from Bridgend, captain of Wales and the Lions, Gareth, would visit the Mametz Wood site, now marked by an imposing scarlet dragon clawing at barbed wire. There he heard of the Welsh remains that still break the surface in the harrowing harvest time of Owen Sheers’s verse:

  And even now the earth stands sentinel

  reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened

  like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.3

  Dick Thomas now lies in name only on the Thiepval Memorial where his namesake Gareth would make the ‘surreal, spine-tingling’ discovery of his own great-uncle William’s name, which ‘made the concept of sacrifice more vivid and personal’.4

  David Watts, the Welsh lock newly capped in four Tests in 1914, was also killed on the Somme two days after Johnnie Williams died of his wounds. His Shropshire Light Infantry battalion was in the same offensive to capture Bazentin Ridge that killed South African Toby Moll with the Leicesters. Watts, a Maesteg miner who played rugby for his home club, and whose body was never recovered, was in that ferocious ‘Terrible Eight’ with Percy Jones, led by the Reverend Jenkin Alban Davies, from Aberaeron. Davies served as a chaplain with the RFA; asked if his pious ears had ever been assailed by ‘colourful language’ on the rugby field, he said: ‘I always wear a scrum cap.’ He lived to be 90.

  There was more carnage amongst Welsh internationalists in 1916. Sergeant Lou Phillips, a Newport half back, was in at the start of the Golden Era with Wales’ first Triple Crown in 1900. His rugby career was cut short after four caps by a knee injury originally suffered with Newport against Cork Con, but which broke down after ten minutes against Scotland in 1901. More sedately, the architect went on to win the Welsh amateur golf title in both 1907 and 1912. He served with 20th Royal Fusiliers, in which Johnnie Williams had begun his brief military career. Lou’s was even shorter as he was killed in March. No set-piece battle for him, just the nightly piece-meal attrition of trench life in the ‘quiet’ La Bassée sector: he died in a wiring party surprised by German raiders, the only casualty in his unit that day.

  Just a mile away lies Lieutenant Colonel Richard Davies Garnons-Williams, who also wore the black-and-amber of Newport. He had played in Wales’ first international in 1881, a humiliating experience as England chalked up thirteen tries; he never played for Wales again. After Sandhurst he took a Regular commission in 1887, formally retired in 1892 but kept a voluntary Militia post until 1906, then was ‘dug out’ of retirement to serve again in his country’s hour of need in 1914. Although he won just a singleton cap, Garnons-Williams is ‘Father of the House’ and one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Welsh international rugby: he was 59 when shot in the head at Loos in 1915, leading his 12th Royal Fusiliers battalion. One of his soldiers reported:

  He led his men on September 25th into trenches lately occupied by the Germans and on the 27th the battalion were in a support trench and the furthest they had captured. This trench became untenable and retirement had to be effected to straighten the line, the supports, both right and left having retired, so that their flanks were ‘in the air’. As the colonel gave the necessary order to retire and instructions to the machine-gun section to fire over the trench to keep back the Germans, he was shot in the head from an adjoining house and did not move again.

  Alongside in the line were the 7th Northants and Edgar Mobbs, who would meet the same fate at the head of his own battalion in 1917.

  Men from Rodney Parade made up six of the thirteen Welsh caps to die, but the club lost many more. Newport had defeated the 1912 Springboks with ‘Billy’ Purdon Geen on the wing; he pulled off trebles of Oxford Blues and Welsh caps and played in the ill-fated backline with Dingle and Mobbs for the wartime Barbarians in 1915. He died at Ypres on 31 July 1915, aged 24, with 9th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC), his last moments described by a Major Hope (little of that in 1915):

  Geen fought gloriously and was last seen alive leading his platoon in a charge after being for hours subjected to liquid fire and every device the Germans could bring to bear to break through. Seventeen officers and 333 other ranks were killed in this engagement.5

  Fruiterer Ben Uzzell played rugby for Newport and Pontypool and was Welsh 440 yards champion in 1912, later winning the English 220 yards hurdle title in 1913. He was killed in September 1918, serving with the New Zealand Army. Richard Brinley Stokes, known as ‘a wonderfully fit man’, was initially rejected by the army because of his flat feet. He eventually joined the Monmouthshire Regiment in 1917, but was killed with the Cheshires at Glencorse Wood during the Third Battle of Ypres. Newport’s captain against South Africa, Walter Martin, was more fortunate. Paired with the Wales scrum half Tommy Vile, he formed an ‘outstanding half-back combination’. He joined the Newport Athletic Club Platoon of the South Wales Borderers and reached the rank of company sergeant major. Martin was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) for obtaining ‘very valuable information at great personal risk’, carrying a wounded man to safety under heavy shellfire.

  Horace Wyndham Thomas from Bridgend, like Phillips and Clem Lewis a Monmouth Grammar boy, was killed in action with 16th Rifle Brigade at St Pierre Divion6 in September 1916, aged 26. He had faced Billy Millar’s Springboks on his Wales debut, almost winning the game with an attempted drop goal (four days after winning his Blue for Cambridge), and then England in January 1913. He would have won more caps if he had not been shipped off to a commercial position in Calcutta, where of course he captained the rugby club. In the congealed stagnation of the
Somme, Horace’s end came at a patch of pulverised red-brick dust that was once a village near Hamel: the front had not moved in a month. Horace Thomas was one of seven light Blues to die from the 1912 Varsity Match that fed thirteen young men into the mincing machine. From the Wales team photograph at the 1910 France game, Charles Meyrick Pritchard would die on the Somme in August with 12th SWB, leading a raiding party to take prisoners for intelligence purposes. He had been in the pack that had battled the Original All Blacks and hung on for their famous victory. Birdie Partridge, writing to his family, called him a ‘fine example of what a British sportsman should be’. To his left in the picture, artilleryman Phil Waller also stayed behind in French soil after the war, killed with his South African battery commander by a stray shell.

  The thirteen Welsh internationalists who died in the Great War are called to remembrance by the detailed research and passionate prose of countryman Gwyn Prescott, which readers are recommended to seek out. But there is another story which encapsulates the scale and complexity of wartime service and the contribution of Welsh rugby in one Bridgend family. It is the history of six brothers: Stanley, William, Edwin, Charles, Frederick and the most notable of all, Ben, who stands with Pritchard, Waller and Hop Maddock in the photographic souvenir of St Helen’s in 1910. They were the sons of William and Ellen Gronow (rhymes with Jonno) of 18 Cheltenham Terrace, who had nine children in all. Fighting and sport were in the Gronow genes: the boys’ late father was Private William Gronow of the Regular 1st Worcestershires, who had served overseas in India and Malta and was reportedly one of the best cricket players in the army. He died in 1908. All six of his sons would fight, four would survive, and two died; for the rugby-playing Gronow family, their fatal fraction would yet again be the infamous third.